Conservatism

First published Sat Aug 1, 2015

Conservatism and its modernising, anti-traditionalist rivals,
liberalism and socialism, are the dominant political philosophies and
ideologies of the post-Enlightenment era. Conservatives criticise
their rivals for making a utopian exaggeration of the power of
theoretical reason, and of human perfectibility. Conservative
prescriptions are based on what they regard as experience rather than
reason; for them, the ideal and the practical are inseparable. Most
commentators regard conservatism as a modern political philosophy,
even though it exhibits the standpoint of paternalism or authority,
rather than freedom. As John Gray writes, while liberalism is the
dominant political theory of the modern age, conservatism, despite
appealing to tradition, is also a response to the challenges of
modernity. The roots of all three standpoints “may be traced
back to the crises of seventeenth-century England, but [they]
crystallised into definite traditions of thought and practice only
[after] the French Revolution” (Gray 1995: 78).

It is contested both what conservatism is, and what it could or
ought to be—both among the public and politicians, and among the
philosophers and political theorists that this article inevitably
focuses on. Popularly, “conservative” is often a generic
term for “right-wing viewpoint occupying the political spectrum
between liberalism and fascism”. Philosophical commentators
offer a more distinctive characterisation. Many treat it as a
standpoint that is sceptical of abstract reasoning in politics, and
that appeals instead to living tradition, allowing for the possibility
of limited political reform. On this view, conservatism is neither
dogmatic reaction, nor the right-wing radicalism of Margaret Thatcher
or contemporary American “neo-conservatives”. Other
commentators, however, contrast this “pragmatic
conservatism” with a universalist “rational
conservatism” that is not sceptical of reason, and that regards
a community with a hierarchy of authority as most conducive to human
well-being (Skorupski 2015).

Compared to liberalism and socialism, however, conservatism has
suffered philosophical neglect (Broad 1913: 396–7). Many deny
that it is an ideology, or even a political philosophy, regarding it
instead as a disposition that resists theoretical expression—a
“non-ideology” that attempts to avoid the errors of
ideologies (Graham 1986: 172; in contrast, Nisbet 1986). Is it an
ancient attitude, or one that developed only in response to
Enlightenment rationality and its political products, liberalism and
socialism? How is it related to contemporary
“neo-conservatism”? Is it a coherent position, or does it,
as many have argued, fail to distinguish what is worth conserving from
what is not? These are some of the questions commonly raised about
conservatism, and that are explored here.

Conservatism in a broad sense, as a social attitude, has always
existed. It expresses the instinctive human fear of sudden change, and
tendency to habitual action. The arch-royalist and anti-populist Earl
of Clarendon, writing the history of the 17th century
English Civil War soon after it happened, was instinctively
conservative in this broader, un-self-conscious sense. Thus Beiser
contrasts the “conservatism [that] had always existed in Germany
as a social attitude”, with a self-conscious conservatism that
developed as a social force in the 1790s, opposed to
the Aufklärung or Enlightenment, and in reaction to the
French Revolution (Beiser 1992: 281). “Self-conscious”
here means not merely implicit in behaviour, but consciously avowed,
and ascribed to others. The most distinctive and historically
important version of this narrower, self-conscious conservatism rests
on scepticism concerning reason in politics.

Various precursors of this self-conscious conservatism have been
claimed. Aristotle is often cited, for holding that morality and
politics—unlike natural science—lack special experts, and
that in these areas, human experience over generations is the main
source of knowledge. Confucius is another possible precursor. From a
later but still pre-Enlightenment era, the English common law notion
of precedent, developed by such as Edward Coke (1552–1634), is a
clear influence on self-conscious conservatism (Pocock 1989). For
Hoppit,

Tory, or what would now be called
‘conservative’, political thought remained alive and well
[in England] in the 1690s and 1700s….Thomas Sherlock [wrote] in
1704, ‘To maintain the Establish’d Form of Government, is
the First and Highest Duty of Men Acting in Society’. (Hoppit
2000: 196)

David Hume (1711–1776) is sometimes regarded as a
conservative. He was a sceptic about reasoning concerning ends as
opposed to means, but did not live to see the French Revolution and
the arguments underlying it; Dr. Johnson remarked that he was “a
Tory by chance” (reported by Boswell, in Fieser ed. 2005:
290).

These thinkers are proto-conservatives; it is commonly accepted
that as a self-conscious standpoint, conservatism came into existence
with Burke’s critique of the French Revolution (Kirk 1954: 5;
Honderich 2005: 6; Nisbet 1986; Claeys 2007: 11–34). The
18th century European Enlightenment aimed to improve the
human condition through reform of political institutions. Its thinkers
aimed to establish ethical and political principles that appealed to
reason rather than established authority or tradition, a
“universal ethics independent of historically contingent
tradition” (Beveridge and Turnbull 1997: 124). The French
Revolution gave powerful expression to this belief, rapidly reinforced
by the Industrial Revolution and growth of capitalism.

For many contemporary writers, the French Revolution was a
liberation of the human spirit, an assertion of reason against
irrational feudal authority. The Revolution reflected the
Enlightenment’s attitude towards history, which it regarded not
as the inevitable realisation of a divine plan, but as open to
direction by enlightened reason, expressed in social and educational
reform. Although conservative thinkers opposed the French Revolution,
their attitude towards the Enlightenment is debated. Burke is often
associated with what Isaiah Berlin called the
“Counter-Enlightenment”, but he has also been seen as
“an Enlightened figure, who saw himself defending Enlightened
Europe against the gens de lettres and their revolutionary
successors”—it was “one Enlightenment in conflict
with another” (Pocock 1999: 7). Bourke comments that historians
have

mistaken Burke’s enlightened opposition to
doctrinaire attacks on organised religion for
a…counter-enlightenment crusade… encouraged by a secular
teleology [that reduces] enlightenment to the criticism of
religion…Burke’s espousal of sceptical Whiggism and
Protestant toleration is curiously reinterpreted as hostile to the
very principles of enlightenment he was in fact defending. (Bourke
2014: 28)

Thus the common assumption that conservatism rejects modernity is
questioned by Scruton, for whom it “is itself a
modernism… [that desires] to live fully in the present, to
understand it in all its imperfections” (2007: 194). John Gray
comments that Oakeshott’s conservative thought is paradoxical in
that he “is in no sense an anti-modernist: If anything, he is an
uncompromising modernist, perhaps even a postmodernist” (Gray
2007, Other Internet Resources).

In its narrow, self-conscious sense, conservatism can be
characterised as an

approach to human affairs which mistrusts both a
priori reasoning and revolution, preferring to put its trust in
experience and in the gradual improvement of tried and tested
arrangements. (O’Hear 1998)

Kekes argues similarly that conservatism, with its defining
scepticism and opposition to “rationalism” in politics,
contrasts with liberalism and socialism in rejecting a priori
value-commitments (Kekes 1997: 368). This position was enunciated most
trenchantly by Burke, conservatism’s “master
intellectual”, acknowledged by almost all subsequent
conservatives. He rejected a priori reasoning in politics,
notably claims to abstract natural rights, manifested most
dramatically in the French Jacobin dream of destroying and rebuilding
society. Burke holds that there is a practical wisdom in institutions
that is mostly not articulable theoretically, certainly not in
advance, but is passed down in culture and tradition.

Revolutionary Jacobinism is conservatism’s polar opposite and
historic contender. The name comes from the Jacobin Club whose central
figure, Robespierre, launched the French Revolutionary Terror. (On
revolution and Jacobinism, see Graham 1986: 178–81.)
Conservatives such as Burke contrast the French Revolution with
England’s more peaceful Glorious Revolution of 1688, which for
them was a revolution in the original sense—a return to an
alleged status quo prior to monarchical absolutism, as
opposed to an overturning of traditional institutions in accord with a
rational plan. Conservatism and revolutionary Jacobinism are
inter-dependent concepts that arose together, in conjunction with
liberalism and socialism. One could argue that there is a conceptual
holism between them, in that they cannot be understood independently
of each other, and must be inter-defined (Hamilton 2013 ch 1.2). In
its modern concept, political revolution rejects the past; before the
18th century, according to most historians,
“revolution” had only its literal sense of “return
to an original state”. (Cressy (2006) suggests that in the
English Civil War of the 1640s, a metaphorical use emerged, meaning
sudden, dramatic change in politics or religion.) With the
Enlightenment, the natural order or social hierarchy previously
largely accepted was questioned. (The earliest stirrings of this
questioning were found in the English Civil War and even the
Peasant’s Revolt.) Implicit in Jacobinism is what may be termed
revolutionary utopianism, which allows the sacrifice of present
generations for alleged future benefit. (According to critics of
utopianism such as Schiller, indeed, one should not even sacrifice
oneself for a utopian vision, as do members of revolutionary
organisations, such as Nelson Mandela and Joe Slovo of the ANC;
Schiller, and Goethe, also provided conservative critiques of French
Revolutionary ideals and practices.)

Conservatives reject revolutionary Jacobinism’s espousal of
political rationalism, which attempts to reconstruct society from
abstract principles or general blueprint, without reference to
tradition. Conservatives view society not as a machine but as a highly
complex organism, and hold therefore that “without the aid of
experience, reason cannot prescribe political ideals that can be
realised in practice” (Beiser 1992: 283). Present generations
possess duties and responsibilities whose original reasons, if they
were ever apparent, are now lost. Tradition represents for
conservatives a continuum enmeshing the individual and social, and is
immune to reasoned critique; the radical intellectual is therefore
arrogant and dangerous (Kekes 1997: 365). For liberals and socialists,
in contrast, tradition has value only insofar as it survives rational
criticism.

I cannot [praise or blame] human actions…on a
simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in
all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction; (Burke, WS
III: 58)

circumstances give every political principle its
colour. (Cobban 1960: 75)

For conservatives, abstract propositions cannot be simply applied
to specific circumstances. Unlike liberals and socialists, therefore,
conservatives are particularist in rejecting universal prescriptions
and panaceas; they reject the Enlightenment-modernist requirement that
practical rationality is liberated from all particularism (Beveridge
and Turnbull 1997). This is not “particularism” in its
dictionary definition of “exclusive adherence to one’s own
group, party, sect, or nation”; rather, it is a philosophical
sense that has an affinity with moral particularism as advocated by
Dancy (2004). The parallel is incomplete, however; political
conservatives do not deny that there are general principles, they just
deny that one should apply them. Their position is an essentially
epistemic one—that one cannot know the general principles whose
implementation would benefit the operation of society. According to
Gray, conservatism’s fundamental insight is that

persons’ identities cannot be matters of choice,
but are conferred on them by their unchosen histories, so that what is
most essential about them is…what is most accidental. The
conservative vision is that people will come to value the privileges
of choice…when they see how much in their lives must always
remain unchosen. (2010: 159)

Conservative scepticism is quite distinct from Cartesian or
external world scepticism, therefore, since this scepticism is based
on reason; rather, it is sceptical about the claims of theoretical
reason, in politics and ethics. Nor does its scepticism constitute a
critique of society in the Marxist sense. For conservatives, society
rests on prejudice, not reason; prejudice is not irrational, but
simply unreasoning. Burke advocated educated prejudice as an antidote
to its bigoted forms—arguably, not a rejection of reason, but a
scepticism about its inordinate pretensions. Philosophers might
speculate about why we have the duties that we do, but prejudice makes
us act, without having to calculate all the consequences—or
indeed to reason about ends. This is not the irrationalism of
Nietzsche or Freud, for whom much of human behaviour is irrationally
driven, but rather, a non-rationalist standpoint. It is sceptical
about proposals of reform based on a priori commitment to a
value such as freedom or equality.
(See 2.3 on Burke below)
In elucidating conservatism, one should distinguish
between the metaethical claim that abstract values do not exist or are
not worth pursuing, and the epistemic challenge “how are these
values be accessed in practice?” Conservatism is primarily an
epistemic standpoint. Conservatives believe that values of justice,
freedom, and truth are important and should be pursued by the state,
but they interpret those values in a concrete fashion.

As we have seen, it is generally recognised that conservatism is
not dogmatic reaction. It advocates piecemeal, moderate reform, which
follows from its scepticism concerning reason, and its valuing of
experience concerning human affairs. Burke argued that “a state
without the means of some change is without the means of its
conservation”. But change must be cautious, because knowledge is
imperfect and consequences can be unintended. According to
conservatives, institutions and morals evolve, their weaknesses become
apparent and obvious political abuses are corrected; but ancient
institutions embody a tacit wisdom that deserves respect.
Conservatives are sceptical of large-scale constitutional, economic or
cultural planning, because behaviour and institutions have evolved
through the wisdom of generations, which cannot easily be
articulated.

The notion of tradition is central to conservatism, and its
self-conscious, contrastive use arises only in modernity. In the later
18th century, the mobilisation of “the past” as
an explicit political resource became especially important, and a
contrast between “traditional” and
“modern”—as opposed to “ancient” and
“modern”—was stressed. Burke’s political
philosophy was an early instance of this process. This mobilisation
has been associated with “the invention of tradition”
(Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), in which mass-produced
“traditional” artefacts established a fictional organic
relation between past and present, as in Sir Walter Scott’s
re-invention of the kilt and other “traditional” artefacts
for King George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822.

For conservatives, vital political relations are organic. Unlike
reactionary thinkers, they regard traditions not as static, but as in
a gentle and gradual flux, encouraged by the astute reformer. For
Burke, the English revolutionaries of 1688 achieved restoration as
opposed to “innovation”. Reform corrects the inadequacies
of ancient institutions in light of contemporary
needs—conservatives such as Disraeli might want to create a
broader suffrage, for instance—but one must disdain “the
blind and furious spirit of innovation”. Reform must be
practically and not theoretically-based:

I must see with my own eyes…touch with my own
hands not only the fixed but the momentary circumstances, before I
could venture to suggest any political project whatsoever...I must see
the means of correcting the plan…I must see the things; I must
see the men. (Burke, WS III: 326)

For Kekes, conservatism adopts a stance of scepticism between
extremes of rationalism and fideism (belief based on faith), and
steers a middle course of pessimism between claims of perfectibility
and corruptibility (1998: 54, 89, 60). Conservatives aim to

conserve the political arrangements that have
historically shown themselves to be conducive to good lives thus
understood (1998: 27);

they regard

history [as] the best guide to understanding the
present and planning for the future. (Kekes 1997: 352)

Conservatism’s “organic” social vision is
inherently sceptical of the state, and puts faith instead in the
family, private property and religion; it does not involve the rich
organicism of the British Idealists Bradley and Bosanquet, that yields
“a mystical union with the superior unity of the
state”—a German philosophical rather than British
conservative conception (Sweet 1999). As Cobban writes, Locke’s
influence ensured that the “historic idea in Burke’s mind
[did not] pass into the full organic theory of society” (Cobban
1960: 89). It is reaction and not conservatism that is inherently
authoritarian. For conservatives, individuals and local communities
are better assessors of their own needs and problems than distant
bureaucrats. Free from utopian planning, conservatives hold, society
finds its own, largely beneficial, shape.

Conservatism proceeds via the tried and tested, relying not on pure
reason, but on what Burke called the “latent wisdom” of
prejudice, instinct and custom, which accumulates across
generations. For Kirk, “prejudice is not bigotry or
superstition”, though it may degenerate into these; it is

pre-judgment, the answer…which intuition
and ancestral consensus of opinion supply…when [one] lacks
either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure
reason. (1954: 34)

For conservatives, custom is immemorial but not thereby static; it
is “constantly being subjected to the test of experience”
(Pocock 1989: 213). But to change the state in response to
“floating fancies or fashions” is to break the
“whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth” (Burke,
WS III: 145).

Conservatism has been equated with pragmatism or political realism;
Gamble (2012) argues that conservative political “thought”
is all practice—self-interested practice. But conservatism is
generally regarded as a philosophy, if not a systematic one. Two
contrasting interpretations of conservatism distinguish it from mere
pragmatism. Both reject a priori reasoning, revolution and
social experiments; both trust experience, look for gradual
improvement of tried and tested arrangements, and sympathise with the
pragmatist’s motto “if it ain’t broke, don’t
fix it”; both are sceptical of reason, and are
particularist:

(1) relativistic conservatism holds that if socialism, feudalism or
fascism works well in some country, one should try to make it run
better through minor improvements based on experience and accumulated
wisdom. The judgement of whether something is broken or runs
reasonably well appeals to values accepted in the relevant
society. Thus conservatives in reasonably functioning socialist,
feudal and fascist countries advocate different modes of social
organisation and gradual improvement, according to prevailing
values. On this view, conservative particularism is relativistic.

(2) non-relativistic conservatism rejects views such as socialism,
libertarianism and fascism that aim to structure society around a
single rationally articulated organising principle. On this
interpretation, particularism does not imply relativism.
Revolutionary systems, and autocratic systems with no possibility of
incremental change—societies that do not exhibit living
traditions—are not amenable to a conservative outlook.
Conservatism is situational, but some situations do not permit
conservative responses.

The sarcastic dismissal of Burke by a liberal defender of the
Revolution, J.S. Mill’s father James, is effective only against
position (1), relativistic conservatism:

In the case of public institutions, Mr. Burke
had…worked himself into an artificial admiration of the bare
fact of existence; especially ancient existence. Everything was to be
protected, not because it was good, but, because it existed. Evil, to
render itself an object of reverence in his eye, required only to be
realised. (James Mill 1858: Vol. V, 200–1)

Yet only position (2), non-relativistic conservatism, can express
the conservative criterion of a well-functioning society, in terms of
organic tradition; there is no such thing, in these terms, as a
“reasonably functioning totalitarian society”. This
non-relativist position is minimally rational and universal, while
remaining particularist. (This terminology is elucidated further
at 2.3). (Lock (2006) regards (1) and (2) as an
unBurkean choice between constructed opposites, arguing that Burke is
not strongly relativist, but recognises temporal and geographical
differences that amount to a kind of relativism.)

Conservatives seek to “preserve the political
arrangements…shown to be conducive to good lives”, writes
Kekes (1997: 351–2). Perhaps he overlooks the contestability of
conceptions of the good life, and of arrangements that preserve it;
liberals, for instance, stress the value of individual freedom,
independent of burdensome constraints of tradition. According to (2),
there is a conservative conception of the good life, and of the
arrangements that preserve it—one that rejects the
over-valuation of Enlightenment rationalism and revolution. But as we
will see, conservatives must steer a course between unconservative
mere pragmatism, and unconservative substantive policy. (The issue
recurs throughout this entry, especially in
sections 2.3
and 3.1.)

For Graham, conservative scepticism is

not so much a scepticism about the moral perfection of
mankind, as a scepticism about the knowledge necessary in
politics. (1986: 176)

But these are hard to separate. Liberals and
socialists stress the malleability of human nature under the influence
of changeable historical conditions. The anti-conservative Rousseau
had an optimistic conception of human nature, blaming government and
society for failings that—according to
conservatives—belong to individuals. Conservatives, in
contrast, regard human nature as weak and fallible, unalterably
selfish rather than altruistic (Kekes 1997: 368). Scruton is typical
in regarding human beings as frail creatures of limited sympathy not
easily extending to those remote in space or time (Scruton
2012). (Rawls’s “limited altruism”
in the “circumstances of justice” seems derived from Hume,
and so might be characterised as a conservative feature of
Rawls’ thought.) Conservatism is imperfectionist, anti-utopian
and pragmatic, “unable to appeal to any future that is not
already present and past” (Scruton 1980: 27).

Conservatism is popularly confused with neo-conservatism and with
libertarianism. But right libertarians and neo-conservatives, unlike
Burkean conservatives, reject state planning for doctrinaire
reasons. Making anti-planning into a principle, or economic liberalism
into an ideology, offends the conservative’s pragmatic,
sceptical temper, which could admit a role for state planning and
economic intervention were such things shown to be effective.
Conservatives reject ideologies, of which neo-liberalism is one. As
Oakeshott argues

A plan to resist all planning may be better than its
opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics. And only in a
society already deeply infected with Rationalism will the conversion
of the traditional resources of resistance to the tyranny of
Rationalism into a self-conscious ideology be considered a
strengthening of those resources. It seems that now, in order to
participate in politics [one must have] a doctrine….
(Oakeshott 1991 [1962]: 212)

The conservative’s rejection of rationalism therefore cuts
both ways; it undermines both socialism, and the doctrinaire,
free-market rejection of socialism. Conservatives oppose rational
planning, but do not dogmatically oppose planning that works.
Scruton, for instance, believes that a market economy is most
conducive to prosperity, but like Adam Smith, insists that markets
should work within, and not erode, customs and moral and legal
traditions. Burke’s and Scruton’s conservatism is not an
economic view, but one that regards society as formed over a long
period in relation with place and land; it treats rights and duties on
the model of the common law, depending on tradition and practice,
rather than on abstract notions of human rights (see entry
on rights).

Conservatism differs from neo-conservatism and libertarianism in
motivation or formal features, therefore. For instance, in both the
modern US Republican Party (GOP) and British Conservative Party,
Burkean conservatism has been submerged. The GOP’s
anti-governmentalism is closer to libertarian traditions; its
patriotic and deeply religious standpoints—and what critics
regard as its militarism and opposition to immigration—coincide
only partially with Burkean conservatism. (It has been argued (Harvey
2005; Ha Joon Chang 2003) that neo-conservatives do not reduce state
intervention, but simply shift its priorities, while maintaining its
massive scale.)

It follows that despite some claims to the contrary,
Nozick’s Anarchy State and Utopia is not a conservative
rival to Rawls’ liberal theory (Nozick 1977). Nozick and
conservatism seem to share a commitment to the invisible hand of the
free market, and rejection of an extensive state. But Nozick is more
plausibly regarded as a right libertarian, an extreme classical or
neo-liberal. It is wrong to say that he is “rare among
conservatives” in presenting it with a “general principle
or rationale”, viz. “from each as they choose, to each as
they are chosen”, in contrast to the socialist or communist
“from each according to his ability, to each according to their
need” (Honderich 2005: 60; see Nozick 1977: 160). Conservatives
avoid such principles. Rejecting Nozick as a model, Scruton stresses
that “political understanding, as a form of practical judgement,
does not readily translate itself into universal principles”
(Scruton 1980: 36).

Libertarianism influences neo-conservatism, but—as an extreme
form of liberalism—is at best neutral towards
conservatism’s emphasis on tradition. Perhaps neo-liberalism is
libertarianism plus related economic doctrines, while neo-conservatism
is libertarianism plus elements of traditional
conservatism. Neo-liberals like Milton Friedman question
drug-prohibition and conscription, which conservatives and
neo-conservatives would not.

Conservatism’s popular association
with laissez-faire capitalism is also debatable; it has been
associated as much with feudal romanticism as with
capitalism. Feudalism is a contested label for the economic system
prevalent in Europe from after the decline of the Roman Empire until
the 16th century, and which rested on the holding of land
in return for labour; in France, it persisted as the ancien
regime up till the French Revolution. A sympathiser with
the ancien regime such as Burke could therefore be regarded
as a feudal romantic. (On feudalism, see Dyer 2002, and
Pocock 1987.) Like some socialists, many 19th century
conservatives reacted against industrialism and laissez-faire
capitalism with a feudal nostalgia. Marx contrasted the warmth and
security of feudalism with the inhumanity of capitalism, but rejected
“feudal idyllics”, dismissing Disraeli and “feudal
socialists” for failing to comprehend “the march of modern
history” (Duncan 1973: 19–22).

Conservatism may seem to share the laissez-faire doctrine,
imputed to Adam Smith, of the invisible hand—according to which,
in a free market, unintended consequences of actions tend to promote
the general good. The capitalist free market is held to be
self-regulating; producers and consumers, acting selfishly, benefit
each other, and rational economic planning disrupts the innate, benign
“intelligence” of markets. The evolutionary nature and
anti-statism of laissez-faire theory appeal to conservatives,
but as we saw, they would not reject planning in a doctrinaire way. In
fact, the “invisible hand” was unimportant and indeed
alien to Smith (Rothschild 2001: 116–56). The allegedly
neo-conservative Hayek, with his esteem for “the unconscious,
the blind, the untheoretical, the imperfectly understood”, is
more Burkean here (Rothschild 2001: 149; see also Scruton 2007); for
Gray, he synthesises “the deepest insights of conservatism with
the best elements of classical liberalism” (2010: 124). Hayek
valued local, transient, untheoretical knowledge, and advocated
unfettered markets on the conservative sceptical grounds that they
best realise organic social institutions.

Substantive definitions of conservatism such as Aughey’s
should be questioned, therefore. For him it is

the intellectual justification of inequality and
privilege, and the political justification of the authoritative
relationships such inequalities and privileges demand. (Aughey 1992:
23; also Honderich 2005: 45)

It is true that no revolution has proclaimed inequality, while for
Burke, the social order is rooted in it; and conservatives may defend
an established ruling class, regarding ruling as a skill likely to be
most highly developed there. But in Quinton’s influential
account, conservatism is more neutral:

political wisdom…is not to be found in the
theoretical speculations of isolated thinkers but in the historically
accumulated social experience of the [whole] community…[in]
traditional customs and institutions [and people with] extensive
practical experience of politics. (1978: 16–17)

To reiterate, conservatism is not essentially associated with
aristocracy and hereditary forms of government, or opposed to
democracy. For conservatives, as for Millian liberals, the viability
of democracy depends on the period and conditions. For Burke himself,
writing much earlier than Mill, a majority should be drawn only from a
body qualified by tradition, station, education, property and moral
nature; he questioned the “principle that a majority of men told
[i.e., counted] by the head are to be considered as the
people, and that as such their will is to be a law” (Burke
1791, ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’ [1991]: 344).

While conservatism should not be assimilated with neo-conservatism
or neo-liberalism, many conservatives have converted to the
latter:

A political outlook that in Burke, Disraeli and
Salisbury was sceptical of the project of the Enlightenment and
suspicious of the promise of progress has mortgaged its future on a
wager on indefinite economic growth and unfettered market
forces. [This] scarcely exhibits the political prudence…once
revered as a conservative virtue. (Gray 1997: 88)

Scruton also laments this development, while John Harris comments
on the enduring tensions that Thatcher exposed in Conservatism:

If you profess to believe in both the unrestrained
market and such old Tory touchstones as family, nation and community,
you will...discover that the former eats away at the foundations of
the latter (Harris, 2013; Harvey (2005) offers a trenchant critique of
neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism.)

Conservatism is further elucidated by contrasting it with
liberalism. Both liberalism and socialism are more theoretically
complex than conservatism, for two reasons: conservatism
self-consciously rejects philosophical theorising; and, since
academics tend towards the left, conservatism as a political
philosophy is neglected. (For instance, Scruton describes his
book The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) as
“dogmatics” rather than philosophy.) There could be no
conservative theory of distributive justice to rival Rawls’,
since, for conservatives, the problems that Rawls addresses do not
exist. For them, politics does not concern the theoretically complex
justification of ends, but rather facilitates the enjoyment of
“non-political” ends such as “country”,
“family” and “religion” (Ashford 1990:
40–1).

It is often argued that modern political philosophy is animated by
the idea of freedom, while ancient political philosophy rests on a
natural order discernible by reason to which humans must conform
(Franco 1999: 2). But as a modern standpoint, conservatism’s
commitment to freedom is contested; it can be argued that the liberal
standpoint of freedom is opposed by the conservative standpoint of
paternalism or authority. The dividing line may be Rousseau, for whom
the purpose of the state is not merely security of life and property,
as Hobbes, Locke and conservatives concur; rather, it is freedom
itself (Franco 1999: 9). Rousseau’s works were held to influence the
French revolutionaries, and late 18th and early 19th century
philosophers were convinced that the Revolution was caused by
philosophers’ ideas of equality, democracy, freedom (Israel,
2002). (In fact, Rousseau regarded the revolutionary cure as worse
than the disease, and was pessimistic about political progress.) In
expressing the standpoint of freedom, philosophical liberalism
embraces ethical individualism—that all value and right reduces
to value of or for individuals, and the rights of
individuals—respect for persons, and freedom of thought and
discussion, based on individual autonomy (Skorupski 2015). For
classical liberals, liberty thrives only when traditional sources of
authority—monarchical, aristocratic, religious—are
rejected.

It is often said that liberals prioritise rights over duties, while
conservatives prioritise duties over rights. Conservative thinking
expresses the standpoint of paternalism:

…the value of individual liberty is not
absolute, but stands subject to…the authority of established
government…the conservative will seek to uphold all those
practices and institutions through which habits of allegiance are
acquired. (Scruton 1980: 19, 30)

Obedience, for Scruton, is the principal virtue of political subjects,
without which societies atomise and crumble; real freedom is not in
conflict with obedience, but is its other side (Scruton, 1980). For
Oakeshott, there is no freedom without authority. For Beiser,
paternalism holds that

the purpose of the state is to promote the welfare,
religion and morality of its subjects, and not only to protect their
rights. (Beiser 1992: 282)

Burke was “less concerned with protecting the individual from
the potential tyranny of the State, and more to protect the property
of the few from the folly and rapacity of the many” (Lock 2006:
321–2).

The contrast with liberalism and its standpoint of freedom should
be qualified, however. Burke certainly wanted to enhance freedom, but
held that it is realised imperfectly in our institutions; pursuit of
an abstract ideal may lose us what freedom we have. Both conservatives
and classical liberals advocate limited government; it is
particularist scepticism and an associated pessimism that define
conservatism. Liberals concurred with Burke’s limits on
government, concern for private property, and judicious reform (Kirk
1954: 162). However, although Burke agreed that government originates
from the need to protect property, he disavowed many of Locke’s
principles (Kirk 1954: 14).

Conservatives reject the liberal’s concept of abstract,
ahistorical and universal rights, derived from the nature of human
agency and autonomy, and possessed even when unrecognised, for
instance by slaves in Ancient Greece (on abstract rights, see for
instance Gewirth 1983). For conservatives, a priori claims
such as L.T. Hobhouse’s “The proper end of government is
the uncovering of civil liberties”, are doubly mistaken
(Hobhouse 1964 [1911]: 19); government does not have such ends, and
“uncovering civil liberties” is particularly
disruptive. However, while Hobhouse, Rawls and Dworkin defend abstract
and universal rights, liberals such as Mill are more
historically-sensitive—through Coleridge, he drew on aspects of
conservative thought. Mill’s abstract utility principle becomes
conservative in operation, through his emphasis on the malleability
and educability of character; our preferences, desires, and tastes
arise from existing institutions, and so any abstract institutional
blueprint fails to maximise utility. Mill holds that a nation’s
history and society decide the best apparatus of government, and he
locates Coleridgean “Ideas” in “organic”
historical institutions—their original purpose and
meaning. However, Mill’s perfectionism contrasts with
conservative pessimism about human nature, and he rejected what he
called “intuitionism”, which fosters conservatism by
assuring people that anything they believe deeply enough must be true;
rather, he holds that inveterate beliefs must be justified by reason
(Mill, Autobiography, CW, I: 233; Skorupski 2010: 24). Despite
the influence of Coleridge, therefore, Mill remained a liberal and not
a conservative, who valued reason above Burkean prejudice.

Conservatives are not legal positivists, however, and allow some
idealisation of rights; indeed, even legal positivists Bentham, Austen
and Hart, in conceding that there are moral constraints, allow that
there are bad laws. Burke held that the Stuart monarchs abrogated the
rights of free-born Englishmen; under the Stuarts, therefore, the
latter had rights that were not simply those that prevailed. Indeed,
Burke does not entirely reject the concept of natural rights. Though
sceptical of appealing to rights that are beyond positive law, in his
Indian writings he acknowledged that when deprived of positive legal
resources, one can appeal to natural law though not natural right
(Bourke 2014; though see Stanlis 1953, and Canavan 1960).

Burke’s French disciples first coined the word
“conservative” (French, “conservateur”); Burke
himself used “conserve”. To
reiterate 1.2 above, conservatism
and revolutionary Jacobinism are inter-dependent concepts that arose
together; the concept predates its label. In 1830 the Quarterly
Review commented that “what is called the Tory might with
more propriety be called the Conservative party”, and Canning
and Peel adopted the label. (The Oxford English Dictionary entry
suggests that “Conservative” originally designated an
opponent of reactionary “Tory” views.)
“Liberal” began to be used for the Whigs, and by 1840
Thomas Carlyle used “conservatism” to describe what he
regarded as opposition to progress. (“Tory” survives, as a
label for the British party; “Whig” does not.)
Mill’s “Essay on Bentham” (1838) described Bentham
as a “Progressive”, and Coleridge as a
“Conservative”. Other European languages borrowed
“conservative” and “conservatism” from
English. Mostly it is the British, and their former Empire, that have
parties labelled Conservative; countries with a strong republican
tradition (France, USA, Argentina) have never had mass-based,
self-styled “conservative” parties. European parties of
the right are Christian Democrat, and in the USA, Republican. One
should not conclude, however, that conservatism is essentially a
British view; all cultures have political sceptics who value
experience.

David Hume (1711–76) is sometimes regarded as a precursor of
Burke’s conservatism. For Neiman,

Burke used [Hume’s] claims about the
impotence of reason and the mind’s subsequent dependence on
custom and habit to argue against radical attempts to change the
established order. (Neiman 2001: 294)

Cobban contrasts Burke’s residual contractualism with
Hume’s

theory of the origins of society and government which
placed political conservatism on a much sounder and more realistic
basis. (1960: 51)

Others claim Hume as a liberal. John Stewart rejects the picture of
Hume clinging to a raft of custom and artifice, because as a sceptic,
he has no alternative: “[He] was confident that by experience
and reflection philosophers can achieve true principles”, and
did not deny that reason determines right and wrong in morals and
politics (Stewart 2014: 8).

Liberalism had J.S. Mill, who as Skorupski comments “[drove]
so many windows onto its innermost commitments”, interrogating
its values and policies (Skorupski 1989: 338); socialism had Marx. For
most conservatives, Burke largely defines modern
conservatism—even if his “windows”, unlike
Mill’s, seem more like panes of frosted glass. We now examine
his ideas and how they arose.

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, the Irish
Whig and parliamentarian Edmund Burke (1729–1797) warned against
revolutions and their utopian schemes for human perfectibility.
Writing in 1790, he predicted the French Revolutionary Terror of three
years later:

In the groves of [the] academy [of this new conquering
empire of light and reason], at the end of every vista, you see
nothing but the gallows; (Burke, WS III: 128)

he also foresaw Napoleon’s coup. His prediction is based on
his view that when compliance no longer flows from customary
allegiances, the result is naked force (WS VIII: 128). As Steiner
comments,

When Burke reflected and published, the French
Revolution was in its Arcadian phase [and] his bloodstained previsions
seemed nearly hysterical…Retroactively… his sombre
clairvoyance took on formidable weight. (Steiner 1988: 3; see Lock
2006: Vol. 2)

He provided “the first serious argument that revolutions
devour their own children and turn into their own opposites”
(Hitchens 2011: 161)—that the violent seizure of power invites
its violent counter-seizure. Its British friends compared the French
Revolution with the Glorious Revolution of 1688; for Burke, it
reprised 1649, when Parliament was purged and the king executed. The
1688 Revolution did not affirm, like the French Revolution, that power
can revert to the people, who have a right to “erect a new
form…as they think good” (to quote Locke’s Second
Treatise) (Pocock 1989: 207).

Burke argued that revolutionaries impose theory on political
practice, when they should rather derive theory from it. In a speech
of 1782, he held it preposterous

to take the theories which learned and speculative men
have made from that government, and then, supposing it made on those
theories which were made from it, to accuse that government as not
corresponding with them. (1782 House of Commons motion, in SW IV:
148)

He thus

regarded as folly the Enlightenment programme of
willed, abstractly underwritten social reform, which violated the
organic mystery of historicism, the [Aristotelian]… unfolding
of…institutional modes of social being. (Steiner 1988:
3)

He opposed radical rationalist philosophes, Rousseau’s
Romantic sentimentalism, and Bentham’s utilitarianism, lamenting
that “the age of chivalry is gone. That of the sophists,
economists and calculators has succeeded” (Burke, WS III: 127).
He held against these calculators and rationalists that “no
great human institution results from deliberation”, but rather,
evolves in ways not envisaged by its founders; “human works are
fragile in proportion to…the degree to which science and
reasoning” have helped construct them (Kirk 1954: 24; Burke, WS
III: 128). As Pocock writes,

the reason of the living, though it might clearly
enough discern the disadvantages, might not fully perceive the
advantages of existing and ancient institutions;

there is always

more in laws and institutions than [meets] the eye of
critical reason. (Pocock 1989: 203)

Burke required close and constant attention to circumstance, for
society is “a dense medium”, never easy to
penetrate. (1987 [1790]: 54)

Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire link Burke with reactionaries
such as de Maistre. But to reiterate, Burke advocated organic and
restorative reform, not reaction:

a nation without the means of its own reform is without
the means of its own preservation. (Burke, WS III: 327; Lock 2006:
305)

The Reflections argue that the ancien regime
could have been restored to its pre-corrupt state; summoning the
Estates General for May 1789 was an opportunity for enlightened reform
of the monarchy, hijacked by enthusiastic atheists and deists (WS
VIII: 175–6). Burke advocated “slow politics”, an
inching forward on the secure foundation of inherited settlements and
loyalties (Mount 2014).

Burke had a Whig belief in limited government. He identified
liberties and rights with landed property, hence King George
III’s praise of Reflections for supporting “the
cause of the Gentleman”. Burke differs from liberal tradition
not in rejecting rights as such, but in his conception of them (Lock
2006: 313–26). He rejected a constitution or bill of rights that
does not simply express existing practice. For him, the only reliable
liberty comes through descent, justified

…not on abstract principles “as the
rights of men”, but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a
patrimony derived from their forefathers… The idea of
inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and…of
transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement. By
a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we
receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, [just
as] we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. (Burke, WS III:
83)

Burke mistrusted appeals beyond positive law, but his writings on
India allow, in its absence, an appeal to natural law though not
natural right. The Hobbesian conception of Reflections treats
natural rights as pre-social, and incompatible with society. For
Burke, liberty is precarious; to say that it is assured by
providential order, and has an inevitable progress, is the kind of
metaphysical principle he abhorred (Himmelfarb 1987: 146–7).

Burke misrepresents the social contract of Hobbes, Locke and
Rousseau as a rather temporary expedient,

nothing better than a partnership agreement in a
trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low
concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be
dissolved by the fancy of the parties. (Burke, WS III:
147)

But his position is genuinely distinct from theirs in crossing the
generations:

[The state] is a partnership in all science; a
partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue…As [its]
ends…cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a
partnership…between those who are living, those who are dead,
and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state
is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society,
linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and
invisible world… (Burke, WS III: 147)

Hampsher-Monk comments that Burke

sublimates the contract’s ideological power
whilst draining it of radical potential: a contract involving the dead
and unborn could hardly be renegotiated. [This rhetorical figure]
expresses his deepest beliefs about the status of political
establishments. Our social institutions cannot (like ordinary
contracts) be the product of any individual’s calculation or
insight (Hampsher-Monk 2012: 202–3)

For Scruton (1980), liberals tend to make present members of
society dominance over those who went before, and those who come
after; some conservative commentators fear that the cross-generational
contract is now being broken by

Burke was a Christian thinker whose conservatism has been traced to
his theological presuppositions (Harris 1993; Cobban 1960: 94); he saw
atheistic Jacobinism as a threat to Western cultural tradition. Many
conservative writers share his religious interpretation of the
contract across the generations. For Kirk (1954: 7), established
religion is among the traditions that conservatives value. But
religious belief is not essential to conservatism, and Oakeshott was a
secular conservative (Cowling, 2004: xv).

Burke’s writings appealed to Continental as well as
Anglo-American audiences; both Tocqueville and Macaulay were
followers. But they caused a stormy reaction from radicals. Thomas
Paine, a friend with whom Burke quarrelled, defended a cosmopolitan
conception of rights; liberty is each person’s natural right,
which only the living possess, and Burke’s idea of descent was a
“usurpation” and diminution of it:

[No] generation [has] a property in the generations
which are to follow. The parliament or the people of 1688…had
no more right to dispose of the people of the present
day…. (Paine 1791: 92)

Paine wanted the American Revolution to abolish slavery, and to
restrain the French Revolution from violent fanaticism; Burke,
sympathising with Marie Antoinette, “pities the plumage and
forgets the dying bird”—the people (Paine 1791: 102). Mary
Wollstonecraft, in her pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of
Men (1790), said that

had you been a Frenchman, you would have been, in spite
of your respect for rank and antiquity, a violent revolutionist. Your
imagination would have taken fire. (Wollstonecraft 1790:
44)

In his later career, liberals believed, Burke showed himself a
prisoner of the feudal and landed conception of society.

Burke’s apparent change of affiliation is much-debated. For
most of his career, he was regarded as a moderate reforming Whig,
campaigning against the corruption and brutality of the East India
Company. Only at the end did he become the Tory scourge of
Revolution. Indeed, Reflections is liberal compared
to Letters on a Regicide Peace five years later, which
demanded a war abroad and repression at home to extirpate
revolutionary infection. The 19th century regarded him as a
liberal, treating his later career as an aberration—an
interpretation reversed in the 20th century. Marx
scathingly dismissed Burke as an opportunist:

The sycophant—who in the pay of the English
oligarchy played the romantic…against the French Revolution
just as, in the pay of the North American colonies…he had
played the liberal against the English oligarchy—was an
out-and-out vulgar bourgeois. “The laws of commerce are the laws
of Nature, and therefore the laws of God.” (E. Burke, l.c.: 31,
32)…true to the laws of God and Nature, he always sold himself
in the best market (Das Kapital, Vol. 1,
Ch. 31)

Coleridge, slightly more charitably, wrote:

If his Opponents are Theorists, then every thing is to
be founded on PRUDENCE, on mere calculation of EXPEDIENCY… Are
his Opponents Calculators? Then…God has given us FEELINGS, and
we are to obey them! (Coleridge CW, The Friend, II (first published 1809):
123–6)

For Lock, Burke’s statements are context-specific rhetorical
acts, never intended to form a consistent system; the traditional view
of Burke as a “liberal” who ended up as a
“conservative” is simplistic, though his views did develop
over time (see Lock 2006 Vol II: 306).

Others have variously attempted to reconcile the earlier and later
Burke. Churchill argued that

the Burke of Liberty and the Burke of Authority
[sought] the same ideals of society and Government…defining
them from assaults, now from one extreme, now from the
other. (Churchill 1932: 40—like Burke, he changed party and so
may have identified with him)

Macpherson argued that by Burke’s time, the traditional order
was a capitalist one, and so his conservatism was consistent with
free-market liberalism; Burke advocated the Whig principles underlying
the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776,
but not the French Revolution (Macpherson 1980; see Burke
1987 [1790]: 15, on how his
opponents are “constantly confounding” the revolution of
1688, and those of 1649 and 1789). In contrast, O’Brien
in The Great Melody—the title, a quotation from
W.B. Yeats, is Burke’s consistent opposition to abuse of power
in Ireland, America, India and France—argues that his
understanding of the American Revolution was not a radical, liberal
one. He was always a Christian and monarchist, and his great speech
was entitled “On Conciliation with the Colonies”; until
independence was inevitable, conciliation was his aim. Cobban, seeing
Burke as “the greatest of the followers of Locke”, denies
that he changed his opinion fundamentally at the time of the French
Revolution; rather, “an inconsistency runs right through his
thought” (Cobban 1960: 40). (Pocock 1994 outlines Burke’s
conflicting commitments to English Whiggery and Irish
Catholicism.)

A fundamental question is how far the “prejudice” that
Burke advocates is non-rational. Was he anti-reason, or just against
abstract reason? Did he supplant individual with collective reason?
For Cobban, Burke was “a philosopher of unreason in the great
age of Reason” (Cobban 1960: 75). A subtler view is that for
him, individual reason cannot discern fully how social and political
institutions work; it cannot see the entire process of communal
adaptation, or understand by itself the principles on which it is
based. As Hampsher-Monk puts it, institutions result from trial and
error, embodying accumulated historical experience in institutional
reason—like precedent within Common Law, which Burke had
studied. (Pocock 1989: 211ff. discusses Burke’s debt to this
tradition; he rejected legalism, and especially—since he was a
kind of relativist—the idea of the Common Law as timeless and
immemorial.) Burke contrasted the wisdom of the law, with the limited
reflective reason of individuals—no one person can reproduce in
thought the complex train of experiences and decisions that led the
law to be what it is—and he relies on the tradition of sceptical
and conservative empiricism in English social thought, including
Coke’s critique of the Stuart monarchs (Pocock 1989). The
British and American common law system is evolutionary, not abstract
like Roman and Napoleonic coded law. Judgment according to precedent,
unlike a priori codified law, is better able to anticipate
new circumstances.

Burke [credited] educated prejudice as an antidote to
its bigoted forms. This did not entail a renunciation of reason, but a
suspicion of its inordinate pretensions. (Bourke, in Dwan and Insole 2012:
29)

Scruton echoes Burke when he argues that beliefs that appear to be
examples of prejudice may be useful and important; the attempt to
justify them will merely lead to their loss. One might show prejudice
as irrational, but there will be a loss if it is discarded (Scruton
1980).

Burke is opposed not to reason, but to the arrogance of individual
reason, therefore:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on
his own private stock of reason…the stock in each man is small,
and…individuals would do better to avail themselves of the
general bank and capital of nations and of ages…. Prejudice is
of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind
in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man
hesitating in the moment of decision sceptical, puzzled, and
unresolved. (Burke, WS III: 138)

Rejecting the dominant individualist cognitive tradition in Western
epistemology, Burke regards political reason as historically
accumulated in developed social institutions—including an
unwritten constitution, practices of representation, and dispositions
notably of compromise. According to Himmelfarb, there is for Burke
good reason—reason itself—to praise prejudice, which
exists on a continuum with theoretical reason (Himmelfarb
2008b). However, Hampsher-Monk argues that

Burke’s fear of the inadequacies of
individual reason has only an obscure counterpart in his belief in
collective wisdom. (1992: 304)

Does Burke follows Hume’s notion of custom, which may be
regarded as irrationalist or even nihilist? For Burkean conservatives,
“reason” operates only relative to or within a prior
“non-rational stabilisation of belief” in habit or
prejudice—a stabilisation necessary to avoid scepticism in the
traditional philosophical sense. For Hume and Burke this is a
customary framework; for religious thinkers such as Cardinal Newman it
is fideistic, appealing to the extra-rational authority of religious
doctrine. Prejudice is normative; the inability to subsume particular
actions under a universal law does not imply radical relativism
(Vannatta 2014). For the classical liberal, in contrast, reason
precisely does not operate within customary frameworks.

Burkean conservatism influenced Continental European traditions,
but these also had a separate development. De Tocqueville
(1805–59) was probably the most Burkean among 19th
century Continental conservatives in his condemnation of the French
Revolution:

Our revolutionaries had the same fondness for broad
generalisations, cut-and-dried legislative systems, and a pedantic
symmetry; the same contempt for hard facts; the same taste for
reshaping institutions on novel, ingenious, original lines…[for
reconstructing] the entire system instead of trying to rectify its
faulty parts. (1955 [1856]: 147)

In Germany, Burke’s Reflections were translated
three times before 1793, implying an influence on such conservatives
as Gentz, Rehberg and Brandes. (Though Beiser (1992) argues that they
arrived at their position independently.) August Wilhelm Rehberg
(1757–1836) was a founder of German reformist conservatism,
whose penetrating critique of the French Revolution bears striking
similarities to Burke’s (see the entry on
August Rehberg, sections 3 and 4).
The historians von Savigny (1779–1861) and von Ranke
(1795–1886) assumed a Burkean organic development of
societies. German conservatives adopted positions from reformism to
reaction, aiming to contain democratic forces—though not all of
them were opposed to the Aufklärung or Enlightenment. To
reiterate, reaction is not Burkean conservatism, however. De Maistre
(1753–1821) was a reactionary critic of reason, intellectuals
and universal rights. Burke attacked the revolutionaries of 1789
“for the sake of traditional liberties, [Maistre] for the sake
of traditional authority” (Viereck 2009: 191). De Maistre
praised Russian political culture as a spontaneous growth; in
contrast, that of Western Europe had been “scribbled over”
by Enlightenment philosophers (see Gray 1998: 122).

In an alternative tradition to Burkean conservatism, Continental
conservatives have subscribed to Thomist or Hegelian traditions,
resulting in rational or systematic conservatism—which might
include reactionary forms. Commentators differ on the extent to which
“rational conservatism” challenges the centrality of
Burkean conservatism to conservative tradition. John Gray argues
that

Conservatives have sometimes disdained theoretical
reflection on political life, implying that political knowledge
is…best left inarticulate, uncorrupted by rationalist
systematising. The [19th and 20th] centuries are
nevertheless replete with conservative thought…as systematic
and reflective as any found in the liberal tradition. (Gray 1995:
78–9)

As well as Burke, Gray cites Hegel, de Maistre, Savigny, Santayana
and Oakeshott, conservatives in that they share a “spirit of
reaction against the excesses of liberal rationalism” (Gray
1995: Ch. 10). Skorupski (2015) contrasts
anti-universalist pragmatic with universalist rational conservatism;
“rational conservatism” does not exhibit particularist
scepticism. Rational conservatives are, who maintain that a community
with a hierarchy of authority is most conducive to human
well-being—though they also regard agent-relative virtues such
as loyalty and patriotism as fundamental, holding that it is
universally true that patriotism is a virtue. This is clearly the
standpoint of authority rather than the standpoint of freedom
(see 1.5).

Hegel (1770–1831) is a key figure in the understanding of
rational conservatism. Surprisingly for a standpoint that stresses the
value of experience, conservatism—Hume excepted—has been
associated more with Idealism than with
empiricism; philosophical empiricists have
commonly been radicals. Hegel has been claimed for conservatism, but
his political affiliation has been disputed since his earliest
disciples. For Left Hegelians including Marx, Hegel’s concept of
free thought was a defence of Enlightenment rationality, and a
critique of traditional political authority. For them, Geist did not
invoke a transcendent power, as some Right Hegelians maintained, but
was an anthropological and historical process of emancipation,
propelled by contradiction and struggle. In the 20th
century, Hegel was regarded alternatively as a proto-totalitarian
reactionary, a conservative, or a liberal. But the “old
orthodoxy” that he is a conservative or reactionary—in
Anglophone philosophy largely derived from Popper—has
disappeared, and he is often seen as synthesising conservatism and
liberalism (Fine 2001: 5).

Hegel was ambivalent towards the French Revolution, the
world-historical event against which his generation thought out their
political philosophy and stance towards the Enlightenment (Taylor
1977: 403). The German Constitution was critical, lamenting
with Burke the “blind clamour for freedom” and radical
egalitarianism (Hegel PW: 93); the abstract, Rousseauean notion of
freedom, attempting to construct society on the basis of
“subjective reason”, caused a “fury of
destruction”. The “Preface” of Elements of the
Philosophy of Right (1821) is a Burkean attack on those who
suppose

that no state or constitution had ever previously
existed…that we had now…to start right from the
beginning. (Hegel 1821: 12)

The Revolution

…afforded the tremendous spectacle, for the
first time we know of in human history, of the overthrow of all
existing…conditions within an actual major state and the
revision of its constitution from first principles…[on] what
was supposed to be a purely rational basis…the most terrible
and drastic event (Hegel 1821: §258R)

Rousseau’s contractual account destroys the
“divine” element of the state (ibid.).

But Hegel’s Rousseauean side is clear in the Philosophy
of History, where the Revolution signals the dawn of freedom:

A constitution…was established in harmony with
the thought of right…Never since the sun had stood in the
firmament and the planets revolved around it had it been perceived
that man’s existence centres in his head, i.e., in thought,
inspired by which he builds up the world of reality. (Hegel
1822–1830: 447)

Rousseau

put forward the will as the principle of the state, a
principle which has thought not only as its form [but also] its
content, and which is in fact thinking itself. (Hegel 1821,
§258R)

Some writers thus claim Hegel for liberalism rather than
conservatism, regarding his philosophy as

the most profound and compelling application of the
[positive] idea of freedom as…autonomy to the realm of
politics. (Franco 1999: 3)

The contemporary consensus sees Hegel as attempting to synthesise
liberalism and conservatism. For Cristi, his rapprochement is not an
eclectic blend of liberal and conservative strands of thought, but a
systematic synthesis:

While Hegel does not appeal to non-human natural law or
providential order, he attempts to reconcile human reason with
historical laws and institutions:

For Hegel, unlike Burke, the political order must
ultimately be justified to human reason, although not in the
individualistic manner that typifies Enlightenment
rationalism. (Franco 1999: 127)

(Though to reiterate, Burke’s position here is contested.)
The Idea of the state unites its divine character with the Rousseauean
view that it is the product of human will and rationality (Franco
1999: 288).

Hegel thus synthesises the universal and the particular:

The essence of the modern state is that the universal
should be linked with the complete freedom of particularity and the
well-being of individuals…the personal knowledge and volition
of the particular individuals who must retain their rights…Only
when both moments are present in full measure can the state be
regarded as…truly organised. (Hegel 1821: §260)

Hegel (1821) argues that in morality and politics, we judge for
ourselves, but not by ourselves. We come to recognise rational norms
historically, as actualised; we always reason in terms of the norms of
our society, which we must nonetheless endorse only reflectively.

Contemporary Left Hegelians treat Hegel’s doctrine that
reason is active in history as the claim that free thought, through
the thinking of individuals, is history’s internal cause.
Conservatives, in contrast, attacked Hegel’s conception of
evolving reason, for undermining the political order (Moggach
2013). But for Skorupski, Hegel holds that free thought or natural
reason must be mediated by entrenched institutions of intellectual and
spiritual authority: for Aquinas, the Church, for Hegel, a tradition
of communal ethical life. Hegel affirms that “the right of the
subjective will”, the freedom of the moral subject, is inherent
in modern ethical life, thus grounding reason in free thought, but
only in the context of a conservative holism (Skorupski
2015). The key concept here is Sittlichkeit
(“the ethical” or “ethical life”).

Sittlichkeit is the third element in Hegel’s
philosophy of right, after abstract right and morality, mediates its
liberal and conservative polarities:

The right and the moral must have the ethical as
their support and foundation, for the right lacks…subjectivity,
while morality in turn possesses this [alone]. (PR
§141A)

While “morality” is subjective
self-determination, Sittlichkeit or “ethical
life” is both an attitude of individuals and a collective way of
life, a set of values and practices or institutions. Its content is
not derivable from a higher principle; it is externally a
culture’s values and institutions, and internally an aspect of
one’s identity. Hegel accepts that an ethical life is
historically contingent, even arbitrary, in content, yet insists on
its essential role in every society, and its need to develop
organically. For him, some kinds of Sittlichkeit are more
advanced than others; at any one time, a more advanced society drives
world history forward by realising it in its institutions, customs,
culture new ideas. This position goes beyond the minimal rationality
and universality of conservatism, which makes no reference to
historical advance.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the thinker chiefly responsible for
introducing German Idealism to English-speaking readers, though in the
person of Kant rather than Hegel. As Townshend comments, “it is
quite normal [to] write the history of English
conservatism…without reference to [him]” (1993: 32),
perhaps because the conservative appeal to experience is wrongly taken
to be empiricist. Coleridge was an ardent enthusiast for the French
Revolution who, disillusioned with its excesses, came to share
Burke’s “conservative constitutionalism”. He
declared that

the consequences of the heroic medicines
recommended by the Revolutionists [are] far more dreadful than the
disease. (Coleridge 1812: 154)

However, revolutionary ideals often appeal to “noble and
imaginative spirits”; one must offer superior ideals, and
substantial reforms. Coleridge criticised Burke’s “absurd
opposition of Theory to Practice”, since “the meanest of
men has his Theory: and to think at all is to
theorise”. Coleridge warned against unchecked industrialisation,
and criticised the unfettered free-market, influencing
Disraeli’s social-welfare conservatism.

Coleridge argued for a national Church exercising spiritual, moral
and cultural leadership, maintaining schools in conjunction with the
state. In a Burkean image, he writes that a “clerisy” of
instructors—a disinterested class restraining against the
self-interest of the others—would

guard the treasures, of past civilisation,
and…bind the present with the past; to…add to the same,
and thus to connect the present with the
future. (CW [1809]: 189)

On the Constitution of the Church and State
(1830) traced the underlying idea of the English state back to
King Alfred. Coleridge asked whether institutions were “founded
either in the nature of things or in the necessities of our
nature”; ideals “can be profitably studied only as they
are reflected in the particular institutions of a living political
organism” (Coleridge 1829: 276). J.S. Mill ranked
Coleridge’s influence on political thought as equal to
Bentham’s, calling them “the two great seminal minds of
England in their age”. Bentham wished to reform or replace
venerable institutions which lacked utility, while Coleridge’s
work was a necessary counterweight to Benthamite utilitarian
liberalism, as

a Tory philosopher [rescues] truths which Tories have
forgotten, and which the prevailing schools of Liberalism never
knew. (Mill, CW X: 163,
“Coleridge”—note the early use of
“Liberalism” (1840))

The work of major Victorian thinker and writer Thomas Carlyle
(1795–1881) bears a complex relationship with conservatism; in
his later career he was a reactionary. Benjamin Disraeli
(1804–81), founder of the essentially Burkean “One
Nation” conservatism, was a politician first, writer and thinker
second. Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94) wrote Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity (1873),
acclaimed as an important work of conservative thought; it has also
been regarded as closer to Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), a
polemic defending law and order with little true conservative content
(Townshend 1993).

Conservatism does not rest on a defence of a landed nobility,
monarchy and established church, so even though the United States
lacks these, an American conservatism is possible. However, it is
argued that owing to its foundation as a constitutional republic, its
essentially liberal political culture has determined American
conservatism’s core commitments (Hartz 1955). Thus Gray argues
that right-wing thought in the USA is almost exclusively
neo-conservative and libertarian, with a

James Madison, an author of The Federalist papers (1788),
is claimed as an early American conservative; others are Alexander
Hamilton, John Adams and John Calhoun. But it is probably true that
Burkean conservatism has not produced thinkers in North America of the
depth of its leading British representatives, Burke himself, Coleridge
and Oakeshott. The original thinkers have instead been those such as
Leo Strauss of the maverick or “heroic” right—a
tradition including Carl Schmitt and Hayek, whose patron is
Nietzsche—or Nozick, who belong to the libertarian right. These
are not sceptical conservatives in the Burkean tradition (Skorupski
2015; on Burke’s influence in North America, see
Deane 2012). Vannatta describes as “pragmatic
conservatives” Holmes and Dewey, whose political starting-point
is present experience, customs and tradition (Vannatta 2014).

Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) arguably belongs in the ranks of
modern conservatives. He rejected his utilitarian precursors’
reforming radicalism:

When all relevant facts are taken into
consideration [he holds] it will scarcely ever be right on Utilitarian
grounds for a Utilitarian openly to break or to recommend others to
break the rules of morality commonly accepted in his society. (Broad
1930: 157; see also Collini 1992)

Sidgwick’s position has been described as a utilitarianism
“grown sleek and tame”, as it uses Bentham’s
principles to justify those of Burke (Boucher and Vincent 2012:
30). Sidgwick’s The Elements of Politics
(1891) exhibits an
intellectual and political conservatism, notably its rejection of
then-popular social evolutionary approaches; as Collini argues, though
sympathetic to socialism, he was drawn to an idiosyncratic variety of
conservatism—somewhat perhaps as Ruskin and William Morris were
(Collini 1992; see also Kloppenberg 1992). F.H. Hayward notes, with
exasperation, that rather than insisting

that Sidgwick should be classified as this or
that…it is extremely difficult to classify him at all.
(Hayward in Schultz ed. 1992: 5)

An important issue that connects the conservatism of Hume, Burke,
Sidgwick is what people have reason to expect over time. Suppose one
holds that justice requires X, but that people have long been
doing Y, which is incompatible with X, and have entered
into life-plans that assume that X is how things are. If one
tries to make society more just by preventing people doing Y,
that in itself is an unjust action. Hence what Feinberg called
Sidgwick’s paradox of conservative justice (Sidgwick
2011: III.5). As
Feinberg writes, insofar as our institutions depart from Rawls’s
basic principles of justice, we have a duty, he says, to work toward
their reform. But in our actual imperfect world

Every reform of an imperfect practice or institution
is likely to be unfair to someone …To change the rules in the
middle of the game, even when those rules were not altogether fair,
will disappoint the honest expectations of those whose prior
commitments and life plans were made in genuine reliance on
the…old rules. The propriety of changing the rules in a given
case depends upon (inter alia) the degree of unfairness of
the old rules and the extent and degree of the reliance placed upon
them…we must weigh quite legitimate incompatible claims against
each other in circumstances such that whichever judgment is reached it
will be unfair to someone or other (Feinberg 1973:
268).

Rawls admits that intuitive balancing is unavoidable in dealing
with problems of non-ideal theory, but Feinberg finds in his work
little acknowledgment of the implications of Sidgwick’s
paradox.

Michael Oakeshott (1901–90) was the last major exponent of
the Idealist tradition, which enjoyed a period of eminence in
Anglophone philosophy in the later 19th and early
20th century. He has been regarded as a liberal (Franco
2004), while others claim him for the afore-mentioned maverick right
(Anderson 1992: 7). But Oakeshott is generally regarded as the most
important modern conservative. His principal target is what he calls
“Rationalism”, a position shared by liberals and
socialists, which aims to achieve ends laid down by blueprint:

the conservative will have nothing to do with
innovations designed to meet merely hypothetical situations; he
will…delay a modification of the rules until it is clear that
the change of circumstances it is designed to reflect has come to
stay…he will be suspicious of…rulers who demand
extra-ordinary powers in order to make great changes and whose
utterances are tied to generalities like “the public good”
or “social justice”. (Oakeshott 1991:
127)

In opposing rationalist planning, Oakeshott argues that the
conservative disposition is not “connected with any particular
beliefs…about the world in general or about the human
condition”, nor “with moral right and wrong, it is not
designed to make men good or even better…” (Ashford 1990:
43). He follows the logic of conservative pessimism, preferring
“familiarity over perfection, the tried over the untried, and
the actual over the possible”; “stability is more
profitable than improvement…agreed error is superior to
controversial truth” (Oakeshott 1991: 169–170). He
contrasted a state that has an economy, with a state effectively
reduced to an economy, and bemoaned the domination of politics by the
pursuit of economic growth as opposed to the good life.

These are very Burkean themes. As Gray puts it,

For Oakeshott, human knowledge is not the mother of
practice, but only its stepchild…an exfoliation from
[practices] that we have inherited…When we theorise our
practices, we are discerning coherences within them, not imposing form
without any set of abstract principles. (Gray 2007, Other Internet
Resources)

In his book of essays Rationalism in Politics (1991),
Oakeshott is concerned with how the rationalist conception of
knowledge has operated to the detriment of practice. This conception
of knowledge holds that all genuine knowledge can be expressed
entirely in propositional terms, in a theoretical system, or a set of
rules or maxims. Oakeshott holds that in the modern world, the
resulting instrumental rationality has penetrated inappropriate areas
such as law, education and the arts—his thought thus
interestingly parallels that of Critical Theorists such as Adorno, and
also Heidegger. Means-end thinking concerning the state is
particularly inappropriate, as we have no choice but to belong to it,
Oakeshott maintains. In an important statement, Oakeshott regards
politics as an “art” not a “science”:

Politics is not the science of setting up a
permanently impregnable society, it is the art of knowing where to go
next in the exploration of an already existing traditional kind of
society. (“The Political Economy of Freedom”, in
Oakeshott 1991: 406)

“Idealism” and “rationalism” tend to be
“utopian”, and thus require uniformity and conformity, and
deny individuality and originality, he believes; they do not recognise
that members of society desire different ends. Oakeshott attacks
“the ideological style of politics”, which pursues an
“abstract idea” blind to the society’s actual
arrangements and their moral and emotional
“intimations”—“men in a hurry” who wish
to plan and mobilise. Ideologists make everything political, but
politics is only a part of human life, he holds.

For Oakeshott, civil associations, are fundamental to modern, free
democracies, and opposed to the modern interventionist
state. Enterprise associations, in contrast, are defined by a common
purpose; society is not one of them. This distinction reflects another
between “intellectual”—expressing
“rationalism” in politics—and
“practical”. Politics, for Oakeshott, belongs to the mode
of practice, along with religion and morality; the two other modes are
science and history. As well as attacking “rationalists”,
who have a rational plan and believe in abstract rights, Oakeshott
also criticised “empiricists”, who claim to be pragmatic,
rejecting tradition in favour of mere reaction to events. We again see
that conservatism, although a practical standpoint that appeals to
experience, does not rest on philosophical empiricism.

Oakeshott is a Burkean particularist sceptic, for whom politics
concerns people developing ways of living together in light of their
history and traditions, not driven by universal extrinsic goals such
as equality or elimination of poverty:

In political activity…men sail a boundless and
bottomless sea: there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for
anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The
enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel… (1991:
127)

The nautical image had been popularised by Neurath, but originated
in conservative thought at least as early as Schiller,
whose Letters on Aesthetic Education Of Man
(1990 [1794]) referred to the
“clock” of society cannot be stopped for repairs:

When the mechanic has to mend a watch, he lets the
wheels run out, but the living watchworks of the state have to be
repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another
during its revolutions. (Aesthetic Education, Letter
3

Conservatives do not believe any general purpose for government can
be given, beyond “keeping the enterprise afloat”—not
the substantive purpose of an enterprise association. Rather,
“keeping afloat” is the thin commonality of purpose that
characterises a civil association. As Graham writes, “the only
purpose [conservatives] are prepared to accept is too vague to
determine any actual activity” (1986: 185); historical context
determines the criteria of successful government.

Oakeshott argues that “conservatism is not a creed or a
doctrine, but a disposition” to enjoy the present (“On
Being a Conservative”)—part of human nature, not an
abstract political idea or ideal, let alone an ideology. Though he was
a philosopher not a political theorist, Oakeshott denies that he is a
“conservative philosopher”; philosophy is theoretical, a
“theory of theories”, while conservatism is practical
(Minogue 2009). However, Gamble adds, that disposition gains substance
from its connection with national ways of life and traditions:

For Oakeshott, the past conceived in this way is
intensely liberating because it is a repository of a wealth of
practical knowledge, which is needed to live the good life. (Gamble
2012: 163)

But Oakeshott stresses that one must, through education in its
history, be “released” from slavish commitment to
one’s tradition, and then return to it newly enriched and
informed. For him, conversation is the model of education.

It has been argued that in his later work, Oakeshott’s
justifications for the conservative disposition developed in a liberal
direction (Franco 2004). While the scepticism of Rationalism in
Politics aims to protect tradition, “On Being
Conservative” cites the human disposition to individuality. In a
position reminiscent of J.S. Mill, Oakeshott argued empirically that
people want to pursue their own life plans, and it is for this reason
that governing ought to provide “general rules of conduct”
and not “plans for imposing substantive activity” (1991:
424). Unlike many (non-Millian) liberals, however, Oakeshott does not
base his requirement of limited government in an abstract theory of
human nature, and abstract rights.

Other notable 20th century conservative thinkers include
historian Maurice Cowling and philosopher Anthony Quinton. Probably
the leading living thinker is Roger Scruton, who bases conservatism on
three concepts: authority, allegiance and tradition (Scruton 1980:
27). He rejects post-Hobbesian contractualism, which presupposes

shared institutions and a conception of human
freedom which could not have their origin in a social contract which
they serve to make possible. (1980: 30)

Scruton compares the bond of society to

the behaviour of children towards their
parents…a bond that is ‘transcendent’ [and] outside
the sphere of individual choice. (1980: 32)

Hence conservatism’s structuring concept of tradition, and
its deference to historical, non-state institutions, Burke’s
“little platoons” in civil society, including family,
community and church. Scruton called his The Meaning of
Conservatism “a somewhat Hegelian defence of Tory values in
the face of their betrayal by the free marketeers”. It is only
somewhat Hegelian, because for Burkean conservatives, history lacks
the moral or spiritual direction that Hegel discerned; there is no
moral or spiritual progress, and people think collectively toward a
common goal only during a crisis such as war.

As we saw, established power that originates in revolution poses a
problem for conservatism. Non-relativistic conservatives
(1.4 above) would oppose
French Revolutionary government even if it endured for a century, and
have rejected the Soviet system until its collapse after 1989. They
would not regard this as “tradition” in the manner of
long-standing, organically-evolving institutions such as English
Common Law. Relativistic conservatives, in contrast, might accept
these systems. Thus Oakeshott in Rationalism in Politics
refers to the Russian tradition of autocracy, merely perpetuated by
the Bolshevik revolution; it is not “good” or
“bad” tradition, but the only one that Russia knows. On
his view, tradition is inescapable, and societies rather rigid.

True conservatism is a decidedly English doctrine
with little appeal…in other countries [because] only English
and hence British institutions have ever been decent enough to allow a
decent [person] to be conservative. (Graham 1986:
188–9)

Graham’s conclusion, that the state is not an
“instrument of salvation”, and we should have “no
very high expectations of politics”, is—despite what he
suggests—itself a conservative view (1986: 189). However, a
conservative response to totalitarianism would be quietist
pessimism—not “connivance with evil”, but realism in
the face of it. As conservatives such as Burke supported the 1688
Revolution, so they should support the non-violent uprisings of
1989.

Modern communitarians MacIntyre and Sandel misinterpret
conservatives when they condemn liberal individualism for abandoning
the notion of tradition to the Burkeans, whose concept of it is
“static” when it should be

living tradition [as] a historically extended,
socially embodied argument…in part about the goods which
constitute a tradition. (MacIntyre, 2007: 222)

For MacIntyre, we find meaning for our lives through what he calls
traditional “narratives”; modes of thought that help us to
reason and make moral judgements, and so we are not as free to reason
or act as liberal cosmopolitans believe (2007: 205). Communitarians
such as MacIntyre criticise modern thinkers “except for Newman
in theology, and perhaps Coleridge who influenced him” for
failing to develop a theory of the rationality of traditions. (We saw
that Burke regarded tradition and individual reason as contradictory
principles, but may have endorsed a notion of collective reason
(Beveridge and Turnbull 1997).)

Conservatives would reply that Burke does stress the importance of
incremental change, while Oakeshott, like MacIntyre, has an
interrogative attitude to tradition. Moreover, the communitarian
opposition to liberal values is limited, and does not extend to
advocacy of religious intolerance and homogeneity or patriarchal
authority (see Taylor 1977; Waldron 1992)—though neither does
the anti-liberalism of Burkean conservatives. It could be argued that
since the conservative tradition is older, and more substantial, than
communitarianism, the liberal-conservative debate is more fundamental
than the liberal-communitarian one; “communitarianism” is
a mixture of liberalism and conservatism. (But see Skorupski 2015, on
“liberal communitarianism”). (A further consideration is
that traditional methods may not always yield the most practical
responses (Scott 1998: 331).)

While acknowledging his prescience about the Terror, liberals found
Burke’s fears concerning the French Revolution
excessive—not the view they took when confronted with the
Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, which Marxists regard as
completing its “bourgeois” predecessor. Thus the
conservative historian Richard Pipes holds that the French Terror was
a “brief… countercurrent”, while the Red Terror was
an “essential element of the regime” (Pipes 1990:
789).

Conservatives criticise “atomistic” liberalism for
treating society as a mere collection of self-regarding individuals,
held together by rational norms and abstract laws rather than gaining
their identity through an organic community; like communitarians,
conservatives object to the primacy of abstract rights. Liberals reply
that “atomism” simply refers to the conviction that
although people live in society, individuals are, as Rawls writes,
“self-authenticating sources of valid claims”, claims that
do not require validation by larger social structures. (Millian
liberalism is less subject to the conservative charge of rationalism.)
As Gamble puts it,

Oakeshott rejects the universal claims of liberalism,
because he is only interested in claims that are grounded in English
political experience.

The great American charters of the late 18th century
are, for him,

abridgements of British political experience,
solidified into an eternal document. (Gamble 2012:
161)

Bentham and—on some views—Burke seem to conceive only
of legal rights; but if one can make sense of moral obligation, one
can make sense of abstract rights.

Some writers on the left find value in conservatism. Raymond
Williams’ Culture and Society (1971) begins by showing
the lessons that Burke offers. But many left critics argue that
“organised selfishness is [its only] rationale” (Honderich
2005: 302). Minogue holds that

the conservative enjoys the resources of his
culture and is not forever fidgeting about big changes promising a
better life (2009);

but for socialist critics, those in poverty cannot be said to
“enjoy” many resources at all, and so any aspiration they
have for big changes cannot be “fidgeting”. When Oakeshott
describes conservatism as a “disposition” to enjoy the
present, Manchester factory workers of the 1840s, or slum dwellers in
contemporary Mumbai or Mexico City, are excluded. As O’Hear
(1998) comments, those who see society riddled with defects are
impatient with conservative resistance to change; for them, the
conservative emphasis on human ignorance and traditional wisdom is an
evasion at best.

As Neiman comments, “the rights of man have come to guide us
far more than [Burke] could ever have imagined” (Neiman 2011:
148). As Kant wrote,

One must take people as they are, our politicians tell
us, and not as the world’s uninformed pedants or good-natured
dreamers fancy that they ought to be. But as they are ought to read as
we have made them by unjust coercion, by treacherous designs which the
government is in a good position to carry out. (Kant 1792)

For Neiman,

much of our experience is…often deliberately
constructed… in order to perpetuate a social system that
benefits the very people who say it’s inevitable. (Neiman 2011:
148–9)

Marxists reject Burke’s inference that since all social
processes and institutions are interconnected, change must be
cautious; they conclude instead that to change anything we must change
everything. For Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, tradition is a dead weight:

Men make their own history, but [not] under
circumstances chosen by themselves…The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
(Marx 1852: 15)

But while rejecting its conclusion that change can only be
piecemeal, many on the left share conservatism’s distrust of
rational planning. While Lenin aimed to impose a socialist blueprint
through a vanguard party of specialists, for his Marxist critics
Luxemburg and Kollontai, revolutionary tasks are unknowable in
advance:

Given the uncertainty of the endeavour, a plurality
of experiments and initiatives will best reveal which lines of attack
are fruitful…[and produce] a creative, conscious…and
empowered working class. (Scott 1998: 187–9)

Lord Hugh Cecil postulates within modern conservatism what he calls
innate conservatism: a psychological characteristic found in all
people to some degree (Cecil 1912). For C.D Broad, it has two
sides:

The more worthy side [rational scepticism] [says]
that social problems are so very complex that there is always a strong
probability that some factor has been overlooked in any scheme of
change…The less respectable side [mental inertia] is the
dislike of novelty as such.

He continues:

Rational scepticism, as a motive for rejecting a
scheme that offers to remove admitted evils, involves two applications
of probability. The first is…that social affairs are so complex
that it is very improbable that all the effects of a given social
change have been foreseen. But…we must have some ground for
judging further that the unforeseen effects are more likely to be bad
than good…this judgment cannot rest on the known nature of the
effects of this particular measure [but only] on some general
proposition, such as: It is more probable that the unforeseen effects
of any social change will be bad than that they will be good. [There
is] no reason to think [this]. (Broad 1913: 397)

Broad is alluding to the fact that every philosophical standpoint
must confront the problem of how to treat its own defining claims, by
its own lights. Conservatives declares that there are no general
prescriptions, but must address the status of its own general
prescription, “There are no general prescriptions”?

Conservatism seems unduly pessimistic about the possibility of
individual, explicit knowledge of society, therefore. There are some
things about society that we can come to know—and government
economic policy, for instance, seems justifiably dedicated to finding
them out. Conservatives must concede that radical change is sometimes
acceptable; some major changes, for instance votes for women, are
good. These must be prepared for—as they were in Britain in
1918, compared with, say, 1832—and preparing for change makes it less
radical. What conservatives will insist is it that revolutionary
change is unacceptable.

Especially since the advent of green politics, there have been
conservatives advocates for ecological conservation. Scruton argues
that “conservatism and conservation” are two aspects of a
single policy of husbanding resources, including social capital
embodied in laws, customs, and institutions, and material capital of
the environment (Scruton 2007). A less noticed parallel is that
between the opposition of cultural conservation and modernism, and
that of conservatism and revolutionary Jacobinism (Cohen 2007, Other
Internet Resources). In Britain after World War II, for instance,
restorable bomb-damaged buildings made way for modernist schemes later
revealed as shoddy and cheap; at the same time, in Continental Europe,
classical composers treated 1945 as “year zero”, rejecting
all tradition. Conservatives would criticise both developments.

Leading modernist poet T.S. Eliot (1988–1965) was also an
important conservative thinker, and so occupies an ambivalent
position. His essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
(1919) argued that true originality is possible only in a tradition, a
living presence in the modern world, not a museum relic (Eliot 1919;
see Hamilton 2009). Eliot’s notion of an artistic tradition, and
the related notion of a living classic, elucidates the conservative
notion of a living tradition—something that has stood the test
of time and is the subject of continuing reference and allusion. There
are “dead classics” or “dead
traditions”—performing arts with rigid repertoires such as
the repertory of Gregorian chant, which became closed by the time of
the Renaissance. In contrast, the classical repertoire of Western art
music is open and flexible, operating—when circumstances are
propitious—as a living presence in contemporary culture. On a
less exalted aesthetic level, the tuxedo is a living sartorial classic
in this sense.

These cultural issues are central to G.A. Cohen’s work on
conservatism in political and cultural spheres, which argues for a
truth in Burkean conservatism that is compatible with liberalism and
socialism, viz. that we accept something as given:

In this sense, everyone is conservative to some degree—for
instance, in preferring to have cash in their pocket rather than
converting to a cashless society. Thus a William Morris-based
socialism is conservative in rejecting what planners and developers do
to the environment that one loves; Robert Conquest allegedly commented
that “everyone is conservative about what they know best”
(quoted in Kates 2014). Conservationism originated in the Victorian
era. The Camden Society, in early Victorian Cambridge, was concerned
with the “proper” and edifying construction and
restoration of Gothic churches and other public buildings. Later in
the 19th century, William Morris’s
“anti-scrape” campaign introduced the idea that good
buildings of different periods should be cherished and will complement
each other. Morris argued that one should take delight in the history
of old public buildings, and not seek to restore them to some pristine
state of perfection.

For Cohen, conservatives aim to conserve particular valuable
things, rather than maximising value. This is “conservation of
value”, but not on the model of “conservation of
energy”:

value itself is conserved, when you destroy
something valuable and replace it by a thing of the same value. The
conservative policy is not to keep the value rating high but to keep
the things that now contribute to that rating. (2007:
10, Other Internet Resources)

Conservatism in this sense rules out utility-maximising
consequentialism:

Unlike the conservative, the utilitarian is
indifferent between adding to what we’ve now got, at no cost,
something that has five units of value, and adding something worth ten
units of value at the expense of destroying something worth
five. (Cohen 2007: 15, Other Internet Resources)

Conservatism is a relatively expensive taste, because it sacrifices
value, in order not to sacrifice things that have value.

It does not follow that conservatives welcome good new things any
less than non-conservatives do, Cohen argues. One can admire Byzantine
icons partly because of their antiquity, and admire Frank
Gehry’s architecture partly because of its newness. However,
Cohen continues, conservatives can regard modernisation as beneficial
overall, while lamenting what has been lost—admiring a splendid
new building, yet grieving over what it replaced. Both the economic
market, and state planning, are inimical to “sentimental”
or personal value, Cohen argues.

Some planners might accept that a building’s existing is a
reason to keep it, Cohen allows, but usually they require a general
consideration—something that it does well, or a majority’s
desire that it remain. This is not the majority’s reason for
keeping it, however:

Market and planning logics tend against the truth
that people want particular valuable things, not just satisfaction of
general desiderata…market mania is deeply
anti-conservative…If you want everything to be optimal, nothing
will be good. Some things have to just be…there, if anything is
to be good. (2012: 27)

Cohen echoes Burke in his explanation of our desire to conserve
particular things:

We are attached to particular things because we need
to belong to something… We do not keep the cathedrals just
because they’re beautiful, but also because they are part of our
past…[We] value our particular past in the respectful way that
we value any past culture, but [also] in a more personal way. We want
to be part of [Burke’s] “partnership…between those
who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be
born”. (Cohen 2007: 28, Other Internet Resources)

Cohen here assumes that all parties agree on how
“value” is to be measured and what therefore contributes
to the value rating. But although relativistic conservatives accept
socially prevalent valuations, revising them piecemeal on the basis of
internal inconsistency or impracticality, non-relativistic
conservatives might deny that value can be quantified at all.

Cohen’s conservative model would encourage the organic
development exhibited by medieval English towns and
buildings—perhaps especially by churches—and which
parallels the organic model of political development. This model
rejects the blueprint model involving an individual creator. Rather,
the town or building evolves—apparently spontaneously, over
generations—without reference to a blueprint, and often without
stylistic consistency. The church as a building—or on the
conservative model, a society—are like organisms, seemingly not
the product of individual intentional action, but evolving
naturally. Most English parish churches of medieval foundation were
not built according to a single design, but developed by addition and
subtraction; in the Middle Ages there was no profession of architect,
and apparently little idea of an intentional, uniform schema generated
prior to construction:

A church building is inherently conservative, and
except for the extraordinary intervention, changed very slowly. A
large proportion of churches had been founded by at least the late
12th century, many appearing in the Doomsday census of
1089. Elements from these early buildings often survive in the
doorways or the base of towers, showing typical rounded arches and
massive walls of the Norman style. Additions over time could include a
reconstructed window, a new baptismal font, a tomb sculpture, or a
series of carved wooden choir stalls for the clergy, attesting to
differing eras of piety and style. (Stanbury and Raguin
2009, Other Internet Resources)

The parallel with conservative political thought is suggested by
Scruton in his discussion of public space (Scruton 1994; see also
Hamilton, forthcoming).

Scruton advocates a public art form on an urban scale, in the
manner of treatises on urban decorum from the Renaissance onwards,
which subordinate the style of the individual building to the whole.
Unlike models that achieve this subordination by conscious planning,
Scruton envisages a process akin to the self-ordering of an ideal
competitive market. He applies Adam Smith’s metaphor of the
invisible hand to the emergence of urban order, rejecting the utopian,
social revolutionary visions of Gropius, Le Corbusier and other
modernists, who sharply separate architecture and “mere”
building in a way opposed to Scruton’s
vernacularism. A district of London such as North
Kensington, where planning was at best rudimentary, and which has few
“public spaces” in the planner’s sense, is
“eminently public”, Scruton argues (1994).

The debate in architecture and aesthetics parallels that in the
political sphere. Does cultural or artistic conservatism in
Cohen’s sense conserve everything in the past, or only what is
good? For the conservative, there has to be some criterion of value in
past things, involving in part their participation in a living
tradition. To develop and defend such a criterion is one of the major
challenges facing conservative thinkers, in both political and
cultural spheres.

Cobban, A., 1960, Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against the
Eighteenth Century: A study of the political and social thinking of
Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, London: George Allen
& Unwin, 2nd edition

Coleridge, S.T., 1812, The Friend: Series of Essays,
London: Gale and Curtis.

Pocock, J., 1987, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law:
A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

–––, 1989, “Burke and the Ancient
Constitution”, in his Politics, Language and Time: Essays on
Political Thought and History, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1971: 202–232.

–––, 1994, “The devil has two
horns”, review of The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and
Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke by Conor Cruise O’Brien,
1992, London Review of Books, 16(4): 9–11.
[Pocock 1994 available online]

Wollstonecraft, M., 1790, A Vindication of the Rights of
Men, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of
the Rights of Women; An Historical and Moral View of the French
Revolution, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008.

Wood, E. Meiskins, 2012, Liberty and Property: A Social
History of Western Political Thought from the Renaissance to
Enlightenment, London: Verso, pp. 236–7.